How CRM Can Help You Build And Retain Stronger Sales Teams

A CRM application can help your team create follow-up strategies for sales, manage and enhance your sales pipeline, and turn sales data into actionable insights. But did you ever think that it can also help you manage and improve the team itself? It can help a team member with onboarding and training all the way through goal-tracking and self-assessment and improvement. It will also keep the whole team focused on the practices that lead to successful sales. Here are a few ways a CRM tracking tool can help retain stronger sales teams:

Train new employees faster – and the right way

The sooner you can get new employees up to speed, the sooner they’ll be engaged in their work and equipped to make a sale. Leadership IQ, a research and management consulting firm, reports 67% of employees learn about their jobs from co-workers. According to a Fast Company article by Paul Glover, this means new employees engage in “behavior modeling” – copying their coworkers instead of their bosses. Even though this kind of behavior modeling is inevitable and natural, it is also potentially dangerous. Equip new hires with a variety of resources. In addition to training education, introduce them to business critical tools, like your CRM right away. For example, let’s say you hire a promising new sales representative. They were a top performer at their last job, and their enthused about your product – a combination that gives you high hopes for them. On their first day, introduce them to your CRM. Instead of just providing tips and tasks that work for your more successful reps. use the application to demonstrate that their daily tasks and goals are defined by the hard data at their fingertips. This will help them grasp how your company manages its sales pipeline and what metrics you take seriously.

Establish clear performance metrics and make rep’s accountable

According to Elena Bajic, Forbes Contributor, you should establish well defined metrics for evaluating an employee’s contribution to achieving goals. Using the CRM, you and your team can outline individual actionable steps that lead to a successful sale from calls to appointments to meetings and finally closes. Once these steps are identified, you can use the hard data provided by the CRM to set initial goals that will enable them to meet their monthly sales quotas. For instance, as a new employee, you may only expect a rate of 10% in setting appointments, but by the end of the year, they’ll need an 80% appointment set rate and 32 closed sales to keep up with the rest of the team. If you look at Base CRM’s won deals report, what percentage of appointments has lead to closed deals? Your new potential star is going to need to see at least 40 people a month to meet the 32closed sales quota. You can also see that 20% of all appointments are dropped, so they’ll need to send up 50 meetings in order to actually meet with 40. And, if only 20% of the calls they make result in meetings, they’ll need to make at least 500 calls a month. Now they know exactly which steps to take to hit the ground running!

Empower employees to own their pipeline – and commission

Once hard at work, employees can track their own progress on the road to their goals. For example, Base’s dashboard shows them how much business they’re bringing in, and helps them calculate their commissions. Most CRM’s should have this capability. This can be a huge help to team members just starting out as they get a feel for the company, the pace of the job, and how the CRM can help them. But it’s also a great tool for the rest of the team. Underperformers will know when they need to catch up, and can use their CRM to see exactly where in the pipeline their sales are falling off. For this, Base tracks specific metrics that give your team an added edge. Need to know what time of day the most successful appointment sets are happening? No problem – your sales team can record this in their CRM as they place call, and then assess Base’s compiled data to put your team’s focus where it will count.

A CRM application can get your team started in the right way – and never miss a step as they turn data into actionable tasks they can accomplish. The ability to know what to do and how and when to do it will keep the whole team confident and focused as they close sale after sale to meet their goals.

Lauren Licata leads Product Marketing at Chicago-based Belly, the country’s leading digital loyalty platform backed by Lightbank, Andreessen Horowitz and others. She’s spent her career running marketing programs for startups – and has learned to do more with less. She enjoys working with tech startups that solve big problems. She... View full profile ›

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Comments: 1

Solid tips Lauren, but I think sales, as with other customer facing teams, need to be shown the benefit CRM brings to their role. In my experience, people only use a CRM which increases their ability to complete their role – so with sales in mind, a CRM must save time, increase prospect and customer data and be usable anywhere and at anytime.